Look Inside

Handbook of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Second Edition

Overview

The publication of the second edition of this handbook testifies to the rapid evolution of developmental cognitive neuroscience as a distinct field. Brain imaging and recording technologies, along with well-defined behavioral tasks—the essential methodological tools of cognitive neuroscience—are now being used to study development. Technological advances have yielded methods that can be safely used to study structure-function relations and their development in children’s brains. These new techniques combined with more refined cognitive models account for the progress and heightened activity in developmental cognitive neuroscience research. The Handbook covers basic aspects of neural development, sensory and sensorimotor systems, language, cognition, emotion, and the implications of lifelong neural plasticity for brain and behavioral development. The second edition reflects the dramatic expansion of the field in the seven years since the publication of the first edition. This new Handbook has grown from forty-one chapters to fifty-four, all original to this edition. It places greater emphasis on affective and social neuroscience—an offshoot of cognitive neuroscience that is now influencing the developmental literature. The second edition also places a greater emphasis on clinical disorders, primarily because such research is inherently translational in nature. Finally, the book’s new discussions of recent breakthroughs in imaging genomics include one entire chapter devoted to the subject. The intersection of brain, behavior, and genetics represents an exciting new area of inquiry, and the second edition of this essential reference work will be a valuable resource for researchers interested in the development of brain-behavior relations in the context of both typical and atypical development.

About the Editor

Monica Luciana is Associate Professor of Psychology and Child Development at the University of Minnesota.

Endorsements

“The new edition of Fundamentals of Developmental Neurobiology contains several excellent new chapters, including some particularly good ones about early nervous system development, and one chapter on social development. As a whole, this compendium of articles about cognitive development in humans does an impressive job of drawing on diverse technologies including behavior, anatomy, molecular biology, electrophysiology, and psychophysics, to address the many aspects of cognitive development. Several chapters compliment one another in important ways; for example at least three chapters address the question of language development from very different perspectives. Previously published chapters have been updated to become more current, as this rapidly progressing field has changed a great deal since the last edition.”—Marilee Ogren Balkema, Department of Biology, Boston College

“This comprehensive volume provides a much-needed resource in developmental cognitive neuroscience. The second edition of the handbook addresses critical developmental issues across levels from the fundamentals of basic neuroscience to higher-level cognition. It is an authoritative set of up-to-date chapters written by leading scientists in the field. This is essential reading for students and researchers across all levels of expertise.”—Debra Mills, Department of Psychology, Emory University

“Praise for the first edition:The Handbook of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience is a state-of-the-art primer on this rapidly developing branch of neuroscience. You can consider it your one-stop source on developmental cognitive neuroscience. The short, readable chapters by top researchers integrate previous research on topics, highlight key concepts, and outline outstanding issues.”—Jordan Grafman, Ph.D., Chief, Cognitive Neuroscience Section, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke

Awards

First edition, winner of the 2001 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc., in the category of Single Volume Reference: Science.